“Il fait le tout en badinant.” Serious? Why, no. “Our French people want to learn without studying”; and they shall. Instruct! Instruct! but as one instructs a child with a lesson in the form of a story, or the simplest little sermon with a sugar-plum of a joke at the end. This was such a laughing philosopher that many persons have doubted if he really could have been a philosopher at all. He turned so many somersaults, as friend Frederick put it plaintively. But the somersaults gained him an audience, and once gained he knew very well how to keep and teach it. It was one of his own sayings that ridicule does for everything and is the strongest of arms. He proved the truth of that assertion himself—in the pamphlets by which he held the attention and commanded the intellect of the eighteenth century.
Read them now—they are the must amusing reading in the world—and beneath the sparkling mockery, see the burning meaning.
They are, considered as works of art alone, much more than brilliant burlesques. Each of them is endowed with Voltaire’s “unquenchable life,” and “stamped with the express image” of his whole personality. Gay, crisp, and clear, expressing his ideas in the fewest and easiest words and in the most vivacious and graceful of all literary styles, they conveyed to his generation “the consciousness at once of the power and the rights of the human intelligence.”
Through these pamphlets “the revolution works in all minds. Light comes by a thousand holes it is impossible to stop up.” “Reason penetrates into the merchants’ shops as into the nobles’ palaces.”
What better proof could Voltaire himself have wanted of the growth of that liberty and tolerance which he loved, and strove to make all men love and have, than the fact that the government, autocratic and all-powerful as it was, could not prevent those pamphlets selling and working in their midst?
“Opinion rules the world,” said Voltaire himself. At last he had made his opinion, Public Opinion. “From 1762 to the end of Voltaire’s life it was on the side of the philosophers.”
True, the authorities still burnt his works. In 1768 he had written “The Man with Forty Crowns,” a burlesque story “on the financial chaos which fifteen years later brought France to bankruptcy.” That must be burnt of course. France hated unfavourable prophecies. It was burnt. But by now Voltaire’s pamphlets were like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Flames could not hurt them. And when they came out of the fiery furnace it was only with an added lustre and glory.
Well for Voltaire if those pamphlets could have engrossed all his solitude. In Beuchot’s edition of his writings they fill ten large volumes. Here surely was occupation enough for a lifetime! But Voltaire had time for everything, and was for ever the spoilt boy who loved his own way.
The Easter of 1769 reminded him of last Easter and the fact that the Bishop of Annecy had forbidden his priesthood to allow him to confess or communicate. Very well then! I will do both.
His feeble body had been ill and ailing for a year—a condition of things which is apt to make the mind unreasonable. There was a recent case of a man called Boindin, who, dying unfortified by the Sacraments, had been refused Christian burial. There was always the case of Adrienne Lecouvreur—“thrown into the kennel like a dead dog.”